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Clay County is moving toward a decision on a consolidated Public Safety Complex that county officials say could cost between $200 million and $400 million. The project would bring the Sheriff’s Office, Fire Rescue, emergency management, and 911 dispatch together on one campus.

Four firms are competing to design, build, and finance the facility. The Board of County Commissioners will hear presentations from all four bidders at a workshop on October 13, 2026, starting at 9 a.m. Commissioners will score the proposals later that same day at their regularly scheduled meeting.

A Long Time Coming

The idea traces back to at least 2020, when Clay County hired Mission Critical Partners (MCP), a Pennsylvania-based public safety consulting firm, to study combining the county’s two 911 dispatch operations.

At the time, the Sheriff’s Office and Clay County Fire Rescue ran separate call centers. The county’s contact for that work was Troy Nagle, who was the county’s Information Services Director. Nagle is an Assistant County Manager.

MCP’s original assessment led to a colocation plan for the two dispatch centers. In January 2021, the firm proposed managing the construction and technology work for that merger, for a fee of $522,020.

That project was focused narrowly on dispatch. It did not include the sheriff’s administrative offices, fire rescue headquarters, a fleet center, or a training complex.

The idea grew from there. In March 2023, Sheriff Michelle Cook told county commissioners the county needed a “campus-style complex,” modeled on a similar facility in Nassau County. She said the county’s practice of spreading staff across multiple buildings was not sustainable.

“We’ve got to start moving forward,” Cook told commissioners at the time. “Piecemealing us into portions of another building or putting 20 people over here, 10 people over here is just not the way to do business.”

By November 2023, the county was asking the state for funding through a formal legislative request. That filing cited a “high level assessment” by an independent third party as the basis for consolidating the county’s 911 operations. Mission Critical Partners did that assessment in 2020.

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What The Complex Would Include

As currently described in the county’s state funding requests, the complex would include a multi-agency warehouse, a fleet center, an administrative building, a 911 call center, and a training complex, all on one campus.

County officials have also held early talks with St. Johns River State College about relocating its law enforcement academy to the same site. That piece of the plan is still active, according to the county.

The site under consideration is a more than 53-acre parcel near the First Coast Expressway, in a planned development called Peters Creek Industrial Park, across from the Clay County Fairgrounds. The county has not yet purchased the land. It has issued a Notice of Intent for the property.

The Procurement Process

The county issued its solicitation, RFP No. 25/26-085, in April 2026. It is structured as a public/private partnership under Florida Statute 255.065, which allows local governments to have private firms design, build, and finance public projects rather than paying for construction upfront.

Bids were due June 15, 2026, and were opened the next day. Four firms submitted proposals. An evaluation committee reviewed the bids over the following weeks.

The Board of County Commissioners is now scheduled to hear from all four firms directly at the October 13 workshop, then score the proposals that same day.

A Wide Cost Range

County officials say the total cost of the complex is estimated at between $200 million and $400 million. The final price will depend on negotiations with whichever firm the county selects.

That is a far larger figure than earlier public estimates suggested. Previous state funding requests described individual pieces of the project, such as $20 million for a combined communications center or $4 million for utility infrastructure, but never a total project cost.

The estimate's scale raises the stakes for the October workshop. With a range that wide, commissioners will have significant room to negotiate on price, scope, or both once a firm is selected.

How The County Says It Will Pay For This

Clay County disclosed a projected $44.5 million General Fund deficit at a budget workshop on June 9, 2026, just before the bid opening for the public safety complex. Sheriff Cook warned in June that response times could suffer without action.

Asked whether that deficit affects the public safety complex, county officials said it does not. They said the deficit is in the county’s Operating funds, while the complex will be paid for through Capital Improvement funds, a separate budget category. The county did not specify which specific revenue sources will fund the Capital Improvement side of the project.

How Clay County’s Plan Compares

Sheriff Cook’s original comparison point, Nassau County, has built a 40-acre Public Safety Training Complex in phases. The first phase, a gun range, opened in 2021 for $1.6 million.

The second phase, an indoor training facility, opened in June 2025 for $7.95 million, funded by a state legislative grant and impact fees. Nassau’s project is focused on training rather than a full administrative consolidation.

St. Johns County has taken a different approach, building a series of smaller combined fire station and sheriff’s office facilities across the county rather than one large campus.

The second of four planned facilities, a $13 million, 20,000-square-foot building combining Fire Station 22 with a Sheriff’s Office operations center, is under construction now and expected to open in early 2027.

What Happens Next

The October 13 workshop will be the first public opportunity to see detailed proposals from the four competing firms, including their own cost estimates. Commissioners are expected to score those proposals the same day, a step that would move the county closer to selecting a development partner for the complex.

Part 1 of this series broke down the six contracts between Clay County and Flock Safety, who signed them, the equipment, and what they cost. This piece examines the patents, software, and the county’s largest, least-understood purchase: a system built to absorb thousands of camera feeds and track everyone in the county.

Flock Safety’s own FAQ page states plainly that its technology is “not a live-tracking system” and that “each image is a standalone vehicle event.” Law enforcement officials across the country, including here in Florida, have repeated some version of that same claim for years. It is not true, and the company’s own patents and product catalog prove it.

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A single license plate photo is a standalone event. A year’s worth of photos of the same vehicle, cross-referenced against every other vehicle it was ever near, searchable by plain language, viewable across county and state lines, is not a standalone event.

It is the ability to answer where this car has been, who it has been near, and how often, going back twelve months. That capability, not the plate photo itself, is the product Flock is actually selling, and it is the product Clay County paid extra to keep for a full year instead of 30 days.

This piece lays out exactly how that tracking works, using Flock’s own patents, software, and marketing materials as the evidence.

The Patent: Flock’s Own Blueprint for Tracking People

In 2018, Flock Group Inc. filed for a patent covering the core system behind its entire product line. The patent was issued in 2022 as US Patent 11,416,545. Its two named inventors are Garrett Langley, Flock’s CEO, and Matt Feury, Flock’s co-founder.

The patent describes what it calls a “Dynamic Surveillance and Object-Based Query” system. In plain language, it is a method for pulling video from many separate camera sources that have nothing to do with each other, and combining them into one searchable network.

The patent lists the kinds of cameras this system is built to absorb. Neighborhood watch cameras. Home security systems. Commercial security cameras. Traffic monitoring cameras. Even a bystander’s smartphone.

This is the same idea now running in Clay County as the Wing Gateway system and the Camera Registry, described five years before either contract was signed.

One example in the patent is worth quoting directly, because it removes any doubt about what this system is designed to do. The patent describes a feature that can recognize when a person seen by any camera in the network matches a specific individual the system has been told to watch for.

For example, the patent describes the system identifying a subscriber’s teenage daughter and then automatically sending an alert to the subscriber’s phone.

Here’s the exact language from the patent:

"For example, alert triggering module 158 may recognize that a person detected in a video segment by object detection module 154 to be at a certain location at a certain time is statistically similar to the teenage daughter of a subscriber to the DSOQ system and, in response, may cause an alert signal (e.g., an SMS communication) to be transmitted over network 130 to a smartphone associated with the subscriber."

Flock patented a system built to track a named person, in real time, wherever the network’s cameras happen to see them.

The patent also describes using “face recognition data points” to search for a specific person’s face across multiple, unrelated camera networks at once.

Flock has said in other contexts that its products do not use facial recognition. Whatever the current state of any specific camera on the market, the patent shows the system was designed with that exact capability in mind from the start.

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The patent’s central walkthrough example makes the scope plain. A car is spotted near a crime scene. Investigators use the system to trace that same car through a completely unrelated traffic camera, then a convenience store’s private security footage, then use a face captured in that footage to search a third, separate network of home security cameras entirely.

Three independently owned camera systems, never built to talk to each other, stitched into one timeline by Flock’s software and fed into a neural network (AI).

This is the same company, the same founder, and largely the same idea now installed across Clay County. The patent is simply the moment Flock put it in writing.

What FlockOS Actually Does With the Data

It is easy to think of Flock as a company that takes pictures of license plates. That undersells what the software is built to do once it collects those pictures and everything else feeding into it.

FlockOS does not store isolated snapshots. It builds a searchable record of vehicle movement over time. Every camera event, meaning every time a vehicle passes a Flock device or a device feeding into FlockOS, includes not just the plate but the vehicle’s make, model, color, and identifying features like bumper stickers, roof racks, and dents.

Flock calls this a “Vehicle Fingerprint.” The system identifies and tracks a vehicle even when its plate is not fully visible or has been swapped.

Retention length determines how far back that search can reach. Flock’s standard default is 30 days. Clay County did not stop there. Contract C23-0007, covering the 95-camera roadway network, includes a paid add-on described as “Extended data retention (Up to 1 Year),” at a cost of $142,500.

Clay County Sheriff Michelle Cook paid extra, on top of everything else, specifically so that a full year of vehicle movement data would remain searchable rather than aging out after 30 days.

A year of retention means a year of patterns. It means anyone with Flock system access can look back and see not just where a specific car was on a specific day, but where it has been, how often, and alongside which other vehicles, across twelve months.

FlockOS uses the data to predict, in real time, where a car is traveling. Flock shows off this capability via their YouTube channel:

These built in features of FlockOS include tools explicitly designed to find relationships between vehicles, not just locate one. Multi-jurisdiction search lets an investigator follow a vehicle’s activity across county lines.

A feature Flock calls “Convoy” search is designed to identify vehicles that repeatedly travel together, surfacing what the company describes as “organized activity, accomplices, and patterns.”

None of that requires a crime to have occurred. It requires only that a vehicle, and whoever is driving it, passed enough cameras enough times.

Despite repeated denials by Flock, law enforcement agencies, and politicians, Flock’s system is not simply a tool for looking up a single plate after a single crime.

It is architecture built to track patterns of association, movement, and behavior across an entire community, over whatever time window an agency is willing to pay for.

Clay County paid for the longest window Flock offers.

All tools and data provided by Flock can be accessed without a warrant or even suspicion that a crime has been committed. Coupled with a lack of oversight from Flock and the agencies using its services, the system is ripe for abuse, which we’ll exmaine in part three of this series.

LPR Pro: Flock’s Own Marketing Proves the Point

Flock’s newest camera line, called LPR Pro, makes this explicit. It is marketed directly to law enforcement agencies as an upgrade from Flock’s standard cameras, and its features describe exactly the kind of tracking system this article has been describing, not as a side effect, but as the sales pitch.

Detailing it as the “single greatest change since DNA”, Flock’s own product page outlines the new LPR Pro’s enhanced capabilities.

Freeform Search allows an investigator to search using plain-language descriptions instead of an exact plate number. A partial plate, a vehicle description, or a few remembered details are enough to generate leads.

Multi-GEO Insights is built to “uncover vehicle activity across jurisdictions,” letting an agency follow a vehicle’s movement as it crosses from one jurisdiction into another.

Convoy Search is designed to “identify vehicles traveling together,” explicitly marketed as a way to uncover “organized activity, accomplices, and patterns that traditional plate searches may never reveal.”

Advanced NightVision improves image capture in low light, extending reliable tracking into nighttime hours.

Visual Search lets an investigator upload an image and search using vehicle characteristics alone, without needing a plate number.

Read together, these are relationship-mapping tools, a far cry from the simple APLR camera advertised by Flock. Convoy Search in particular has nothing to do with reading a single license plate.

Its entire purpose is identifying who travels with whom, how often, and where. Multi-GEO Insights exists to erase jurisdictional boundaries as a limit on tracking. Visual Search exists so a plate isn't even required to start building a profile of a vehicle’s movements.

As of this writing, Flock lists LPR Pro as available on its website, following a waitlist rollout. Clay County has not indicated whether any of its contracts include or will be upgraded to LPR Pro.

That is a direct, answerable question to put to CCSO, since the county’s existing Falcon cameras and its extended one-year retention purchase make it a natural next customer for this upgrade.

The Wing Gateway: How Outside Cameras Get Pulled Into FlockOS

Flock’s network extends beyond its own Falcon and Condor cameras. Flock designed and built a device that can pull in any camera a law enforcement agency has access to, called the Wing Gateway.

CCSO’s Wing Gateway contract, covered in Part 1, installs 104 network devices across the county. Their job is simple. They plug into cameras CCSO does not own and pull that video into FlockOS.

Clay County’s contract documents state the cameras were already “being ingested into FUSUS via FUSUS core.” FUSUS is a separate real-time crime center platform, now owned by Axon, the Taser and body-camera company.

FUSUS connects to existing security and traffic cameras, regardless of brand, and streams their footage into one dashboard that law enforcement can search and monitor live. Before the Wing Gateway contract, many of Clay County’s outside camera feeds reached the sheriff’s office this way.

The Wing Gateway devices serve the same role, but for Flock. Each gateway plugs directly into a group of existing IP cameras, from 8 to 128 at a time depending on the model, and routes their feeds into FlockOS instead of, or alongside, FUSUS.

The effect is that cameras never manufactured or sold by Flock, cameras owned by businesses, HOAs, or other government buildings, become searchable inside Flock’s own platform once connected through a gateway.

Together, the 104 Wing Gateway devices purchased can pull in 1,520 camera streams, though the statement of work configures only up to 100 to start. That leaves substantial room to grow the network without buying more hardware.

Clay County’s Flock contracts were framed, publicly, around license plate readers on roadways. The patents, underlying software, and the company’s newest product reveal a system built for something larger: continuous tracking of vehicles, their associations, their movement patterns, and eventually people.

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Since 2023, Clay County has entered into at least six separate contracts with Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based surveillance technology company.

Combined, these contracts commit local government to roughly $1.76 million in spending, with an estimated $1.56 million already paid as of this writing.

This is the first comprehensive public accounting of everything Clay County has purchased from Flock Safety, who signed for it, and what it would take to walk away.

Part 2 of this series takes a closer look at the surveillance network's AI-powered capabilities, including the county’s largest and least-understood purchase: the Wing Gateway/FlockOS Elite system.

Six Contracts, Two Different Government Entities

A key finding threading through these records: not all of these contracts were signed the same way. The Board of County Commissioners executed three through County Manager Howard Wanamaker. Three were executed directly by the Clay County Sheriff’s Office, without a BOCC vote.

The 95-camera roadway network accounts for roughly 78% of all committed spending and carries by far the longest lock-in period of any contract: a full five years, versus one or two years for everything else.

The 95 roadside cameras are the devices now partially affected by FDOT’s August 31 memo.

What’s in Each Contract

Gun Range Cameras (2022/2023-250): Four Condor PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) cameras with LTE cellular service, installed at what county records describe as a gun range.

These cameras are tied into the FlockOS “Community” package, which allows CCSO to view privately shared Flock devices within the county but does not include the broader state or nationwide license-plate search network.

Park Cameras (2023/2024-314): Five solar-powered, LTE-streamed, non-PTZ Condor fixed cameras with 30 days of on-device storage. These cameras are installed at:

• Moody Avenue Park (1)

• Ronnie Van Zant Park (2)

• The Regional Sports Complex (2)

The park cameras feed into the FlockOS “Essentials,” which includes State Network and Nationwide Network license plate lookup. Plates captured at these parks are searchable against a nationwide database, not just kept local.

PTZ Cameras (PO 250055): Six more Condor PTZ cameras with LTE service, plus a FreeForm add-on, an AI-powered natural-language search tool across the department’s LPR images and video footage. The contract does not specify installation locations.

Mobile LPR Trailers: Two LPR Trailer Bundles (three LPR cameras total) mounted on Wanco Flock Ready Trailers, plus a Mobile Security Trailer package.

The mobile security trailer is a self-contained unit that contains:

• Two PTZ cameras

• One 360-degree multisensor camera

• A blue deterrence light

• An audio talk-down speaker

All of this is mounted on a solar- and battery-powered trailer equipped with a radar speed sign.

Unlike every other Flock product in these contracts, these units are mobile—deployable anywhere in the county on short notice, with no built-in fixed-location transparency.

Wing Gateway/FlockOS Elite (PO 250056): A 104-device system integrating existing third-party camera feeds county-wide, paired with Flock’s top-tier software subscription. This allows Sheriff Cook to integrate up to 1,500 cameras into the surveillance network, even if they aren’t made by Flock. (Covered in full detail in Part 2 of this series.)

95-Camera Roadway Network (C23-0007): Ninety-five Flock Safety Falcon® cameras. Falcons are Flock’s flagship “infrastructure-free” fixed license plate reader. This reader uses Vehicle Fingerprint technology to log not just plates but also vehicle make, color, type, and identifying features such as bumper stickers and roof racks. This is the network referenced in CCSO’s recent removal announcement following the FDOT memo.

Notably, this contract also includes a $142,500 add-on for extended data retention, up to one full year, rather than the 30-day retention period stated elsewhere in Flock’s own paperwork and referenced in CCSO’s public messaging, plus a $25,000 “Advanced Search” AI query tool.

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What The Contracts Say About Early Termination

For residents wondering whether a future commission or sheriff could simply cancel these programs, the contracts offer a limited answer—and it isn’t “yes, easily.”

The 95-camera network’s master agreement (C23-0007) — by far the largest and longest contract — spells out only three ways out:

1. Non-renewal notice before the end of the current term. But the initial term here is 60 months, so this route isn’t available until 2028 at the earliest.

2. Termination for material breach — available to either party, but only after a 30-day notice period during which the breaching party can “cure” the breach and keep the contract alive.

3. Non-appropriation of funds — if Clay County government fails to budget the money to continue the contract, CCSO can terminate with 30 days’ written notice. This is the only genuine early exit, and it requires an actual funding gap, not simply a policy decision to discontinue the program.

Notably absent from this contract: any general “termination for convenience” clause that would let the county simply choose to walk away for policy reasons—over privacy concerns, cost, or public pressure—without breaching, waiting out the term, or engineering a budget shortfall.

The BOCC-signed contracts (Gun Range, Parks) are governed by Clay County’s own Standard Addendum, which overrides Flock’s standard auto-renewal language: those contracts do not renew automatically and require a new written agreement between the parties to continue past their initial term.

That addendum also caps the county’s payment obligation at whatever is appropriated in a given fiscal year. A narrower protection than an outright right to cancel, but still a meaningfully different structure than the CCSO-signed agreements.

The CCSO-signed contracts (the PTZ cameras, mobile trailers, and Wing Gateway/Elite) appear to follow the master agreement’s standard auto-renewal terms, continuing indefinitely unless either party gives 30 days’ non-renewal notice before the end of the current term.

Summary

Taken together, these six contracts show a Clay County Sheriff’s Office spending pattern that is larger, longer-term, and more independent of the county’s elected commissioners than previously documented publicly.

The largest and longest single commitment, a 5-year, $1.37 million agreement with no convenience exit, was signed by the Sheriff’s Office, not the Board of County Commissioners, with no input from the public.

Part 2 of this series examines what all of this money actually bought: the equipment, the software, and a system capable of pulling in more than 1,500 camera streams from across the county.

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The Middleburg Civic Center was a fire marshal’s nightmare—had there been one at last night’s meeting. Well over one hundred residents filled the chairs and stood elbow-to-elbow along the sides of the room to make a historical decision.

That decision?

To fire the entire Clay County Board of County Commissioners, who had recently slapped them with hefty new taxes under the guise of “stormwater drainage improvement fees.”

The Meeting

Keystone Heights’ resident Charles Hodges, a county dock builder and the unofficial general leading the charge against the fees, opened the meeting.

There was no agenda. But had there been one, the first item, after the praying and pledging, might have been to warm up the tar and begin the pre-plucking of the chicken feathers.

But despite the tension in the room, the crowd consisted mostly of folks who had done their homework and came armed with research, facts, and plenty of well-thought-out arguments to stop the large taxes.

A committee was established to begin the next step in the recall process under Florida law, which is to initiate petitions naming the officials to be recalled and the specific charges against them.

If the required threshold of valid signatures for each commissioner is verified by the supervisor of elections, recall elections will be scheduled.

Florida law says the recall charges are limited to one or more of the following:

• Misfeasance (improper performance)

• Neglect of duty

• Drunkenness

• Incompetence

• Permanent inability to perform official duties

• Commission of a felony

There was, at first, whispered support for District 4 Commissioner Betsy Condon who, along with District 2 Commissioner Alexandra Compere, had voted against the fee and traditionally voted in accordance with the wishes of the people.

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But as the debate continued, it appeared folks wanted a clean slate and were willing to throw Condon out with the people on the commission that she sat amongst.

Robert Meadows, a retired navy pilot and engineer in the county, appeared well-versed in all aspects of Clay’s business. He said the county’s unjustified and unfair levy of the stormwater taxes appeared illegal, at best.

Meadows noted that research showed stormwater fees could only be levied on parcels of land that gained a “benefit” from drainage work. He said the benefit was tied to the property, not the individual property owner.

Commissioners have maintained that even though most properties throughout the county would not have any drainage work done on their land, the owners still had to pay the fees as they would “derive a benefit.”

The benefit, the county said, was property owners would, in some way, come in contact with properties which had drainage improvements and that therefore constituted a benefit to the property owner.

Meadows also said the consultants’ report showed for stormwater work to be in compliance, the county would be required to hire a Stormwater Manager, a Stormwater Geographic Information System (GIS ) Analyst, and a Storm Drain Inspector. The report showed these three people would cost the county around $3 million dollars a year.

The common thread among those attending the meeting was they all believed the fees were being imposed to help dig the county out of the financial hole created by the very people now asking the residents to pay for the shovel.

Bad Decisions, Broken Promises and Failures by the Commission

Many of those who attended the meeting characterized the stormwater fees as just the latest affront and began expounding on a long and growing list of years of grievances.

The County’s audit, which is required by the state and routinely done by outside auditors, Meadows noted, showed the county had failed to follow procedures and was “out of compliance” with some state statutes.

It appeared, from the related incidents, that getting a face-to-face with the county manager or some department heads was tougher than getting an audience with the Pope—and with less miracles.

Yet, Meadows reminded the taxpayers that the county manager and department heads’ salaries were some of the highest in the state—larger than that of the governor and with astounding benefits—although many appeared to be just seat warmers with underlings tasked to do the county’s work.

Residents complained that road construction was haphazard and years behind schedule, which caused delays, frustration, and gridlock for people trying to get to work, get to school, get home, and get on with their lives.

The taxpayers spoke of how commissioners had allowed developers to build massive developments in the county and provided “loopholes” for them to forgo proper infrastructure, which threatened water sources, the electric grids, and moved tax burdens to citizens.

Attendees grieved the fact that the commission had voted last week, on a 3-2 vote, to reinstitute taxes on county services which had previously been reduced for disabled veterans.

The list of offenses grew longer and hotter than this year’s Florida Summer.

“I’ve seen this before,” said Garreth Cumber, who moved from New York over a decade ago. “This is the way it starts—first it’s the stormwater, then meters on the well, then sewer taxes on septic systems, then before you know it, you’re paying $14,000 in taxes on a small home you’ve already paid off. We have to stop it now.”

Residents said the commission’s blatant failures and disregard for the pocketbooks of the taxpayers created the foundation for the recall.

“If you do a bad job,” Hodges said, “you need to go and you sure don’t deserve a raise.”

Citizens’ Future Plans

After looking at different departments in the county, some residents—experienced in budgets—said it appears Clay County does not have a budget problem, but a spending problem. So, aside from the recall, a separate group of committed residents are also planning to review the bulging budgets of the different departments in the county and determine where cuts can be made to save residents from paying the stormwater fees and for the county’s extravagant spending.

There’s plans for more stormwater meetings, more research and, it appears, more surprises in store for the commission—“Hold my beer” somebody against the back wall summed up the pending plans.

If the Clay County Commission thinks the stormwater tax is one-and-done, they may want to reconsider. The fat lady hasn’t sung yet…she’s just warming up, and judging by last night’s crowd—this show may run for a while.

American history teachers must be having a Flock moment. “Hallelujah! The kids were listening after all,” they might be thinking.

Recently, someone burned up two Flock surveillance cameras spying on the gun range at the Ocala National Forest. When a video was posted on Facebook showing the wreckage, the very first comment came from a fella named Jacob Landrum, who wrote, “The tea is in the harbor, folks!”

That was like the thousandth time someone on social media had equated Flock camera vandalism to the Boston Tea Party.

Flashback to December 1773: Sixty to 100 colonial bad boys in the Sons of Liberty, barely disguised as Mohawk warriors, dumped 342 chests of British tea into Boston Harbor. Led by the rabblerousing Sam Adams, they were protesting taxation without representation—a tax on tea. This spectacular act of vandalism cost British merchants the equivalent of nearly $2 million today.

Thus inspired, there is a nationwide plan to destroy Flock cameras on October 31, 2026. “Patriots” from Michigan to Middleburg, in costumes ranging from Mohawk to Michael Jackson, are to set out with Sawzalls in trick-or-treat sacks, their minds bent on mischief.

Once asked by Clay News & Views whether the Sheriff’s Office has an “intelligence unit,” Michelle Cook said (without irony) that it did not. But the FDLE surely does, and so rumors of the upcoming Halloween insurrection—the 31st is on a Saturday, by the way—are a known thing amongst law enforcement.

This week, the State of Florida ordered all Flocks off state roads. This was telegraphed the week before, one supposes, after Mr. Law-and-Order himself, Governor Ron DeSantis, wetted his index finger and held it aloft to discern which way the political breeze was blowing. Turns out the wind that day favored “personal liberty.”

It did not hurt that the DeSantis administration had just been exposed as having stolen $10 million from a fund for poor people’s health care and used the money to advertise against the legalization of marijuana, that being another personal liberty that more than half of Florida voters aspire to.

So, maybe The Great Un-Flocking of Florida was the kind of distraction we see on a daily basis coming from Washington, D.C.

Or is it something else? Maybe DeSantis and other Masters of the Florida Universe are worried what might happen if Floridians woke up on November 1 to a landscape of toppled Flocks.

And images of Batman and Robin in handcuffs—a Florida moment for the ages.

The “October Surprise” to end all, with an unknowable potential to create chaos two days later on Election Day.

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Already, Facebook people are posting tutorials on “jury nullification.” This ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition allows our juries to disregard the evidence before them and, effectively, declare any criminal charges as unjust—one trial at time.

Destruction of property may be a crime, but, by applying a competing harms defense, Flock cameras might be seen as representing an unconstitutional affront so egregious that it far outweighs the mere $3,500 cost of the camera.

As CN&V has posted stories on the Flock debate, there is a distinct minority that defends the cameras as a law enforcement tool, prioritizing public safety over privacy rights. Judging by the response to these folks, you might think it was Benjamin Franklin who had died yesterday, not Dolly Parton.

This is the guy who invented the lightning rod, bifocal lenses, swim fins and a musical instrument made of glass, who charted the Gulf Stream and hornswaggled the French King into entering the War of Independence on our side. Yet, at the moment, he is a thousand times memorialized on Facebook for saying:

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

(Franklin, in fact, was not talking about government intrusion, but something else altogether, but at this point does it really matter?),

During the Revolution those folks who remained loyal to the British monarchy were called “Tories.” They constituted up to a third of the population. After the war, many were expelled to Canada, the West Indies or back to Jolly Ole England. Others toughed it out, and their descendants are among us today—maybe even here in Clay County. Ya think?

The temptation was great to employ AI to adorn Sheriff Cook in the uniform of a Colonial-Era British general. We resisted, and you’re welcome, though she would have looked pretty spiffy in scarlet, white frills and a tricorn cap.

Yes, social media has begun to label Flock supporters as “redcoats.” There are memes to that effect.

One humor columnist printed in CN&V described how Flock cameras really work:

I can understand how there may be some confusion about what these cameras actually do. Captain Ryan Bailey of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office reassured everyone that “the camera itself is only capturing the vehicle traveling down the road.” That’s it. Just the vehicle. And the plate. And the time. And the location. And the direction of travel. And the make, model, and color. But definitely not the driver. Unless the driver is visible through the windshield, in which case, also the driver. But that’s it. Probably.

Yeah…no. That’s not it. Definitely. As you will learn from Josh Allen’s reporting over the next few days, Flock surveillance is already deeply embedded in Clay County and the system has been designed to expand exponentially in its ability to track…well…everybody.

History teachers might see the parallel to the Colonial Era “Writs of Assistance.” These pieces of parchment were general warrants that allowed British officials to search any home or business at any time for smuggled goods without needing specific reason or evidence.

Yet, there are those of you in Clay County who don’t mind that you are being tracked without ever having committed a crime, or even evidence that a crime has been committed.

“If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” they say on Facebook. Don’t mind those Writs of Assistance, people. No worries as long as you don’t have smuggled goods under the bed.

Appearing to be about 14 years old, Garret Langley is nonetheless CEO of Flock. Langley went on television recently and told viewers that they should be willing to “compromise” their individual rights to better secure the hive.

From George III’s mouth directly to Tory ears.

Interesting times, people. Happy Upcoming Halloween and God Bless the King!

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Clay County Commissioner James Renninger has faced sharp criticism online in the days since he defended his vote to cut the county’s disabled veteran solid waste exemption from 100% to 50% by invoking a veteran he knew who, he said, was “a hundred percent totally and permanently disabled” while flying for FedEx and earning $400,000 a year.

A review of VA disability rules, along with the best available national fraud data, shows Renninger’s anecdote doesn’t actually describe abuse of the system as it’s currently structured — and that the kind of widespread fraud his remarks imply is statistically unlikely, based on available federal data.

At the same time, the debate he’s gesturing toward — how long a “permanent” disability rating should go unreviewed — is a real and long-running one in veterans policy, not something he invented.

What The Vote Actually Does

The commission’s decision reduces the county’s solid waste/garbage fee exemption for disabled veterans from a full waiver to a 50% discount, meaning affected veterans will now owe $179 per year.

County records reviewed by CN&V show a gap between two official counts of how many people the change affects: county staff has cited roughly 3,700 current exemption holders, while the Property Appraiser’s rolls show 4,565 fully exempt disabled-veteran parcels — a discrepancy staff has attributed to the exemption being tracked separately across offices.

Depending on the number of Clay County residents impacted, the exemption reduction could generate between $600,000 and $800,000 in additional funds for the county.

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Two Kinds of “100% Disabled”

Renninger’s comments blur a distinction that turns out to be central to whether his example describes a loophole or simply how the VA benefit is designed to work. The VA recognizes two separate paths to full disability compensation, and only one of them restricts how much a veteran can earn.

Schedular 100% Rating:

This rating is based on the severity of a veteran’s service-connected medical conditions and is determined using VA’s rating tables. If those conditions combine to 100%, the veteran receives full compensation — with no restriction on income or employment. A veteran with a schedular 100% rating can work full-time, run a business, or earn any amount of money without affecting the benefit.

TDIU — Total Disability Based on Individual Unemployability:

This is a different benefit that pays veterans at the 100% rate even when their combined disability rating is lower than 100%, on the basis that their conditions prevent them from holding steady, meaningful work. To qualify on the standard track, a veteran generally needs one condition rated at 60% or higher, or multiple conditions that combine to 70%, with at least one rated 40% or higher.

Unlike the schedular rating, TDIU comes with a real employment test: the VA requires that the veteran be unable to secure “substantially gainful employment,” generally meaning steady work above the poverty line. Earning $400,000 a year as a commercial airline pilot would not meet that standard — TDIU recipients are limited to marginal or “sheltered” work, not high-earning careers.

In plain terms: the FedEx pilot scenario Renninger described is only “abusing the system” if the veteran was collecting TDIU while working full-time at a high salary, something VA rules don’t allow.

If, as Renninger said, the individual carried a “Permanent and Total” schedular 100% rating, there is no income restriction to violate, and receiving both the compensation and the salary is not a rules violation under the program as currently written.

Technically, He’s Not Wrong

Even so, Renninger’s remarks touch on a debate that is real, even if it doesn’t map cleanly onto the vote he cast. Not every 100% rating is designated “Permanent and Total” (P&T) — a status meant to signal VA has determined a condition is both total and unlikely to ever improve.

Ratings that lack that P&T protection remain subject to periodic reassessment, and the VA has floated proposed 2026 changes to how disabilities — particularly mental health conditions — are evaluated going forward. Those changes are still proposals, not final rules, but they reflect a live conversation inside VA and among veterans’ advocates about how ratings are assigned and reviewed.

Renninger’s framing that “the pendulum has swung” and that scrutiny of the system is increasing isn’t manufactured — it echoes a genuine, ongoing federal policy discussion, even though that discussion is happening at the VA level, not chiefly in Congress as he suggested.

How Likely Is Widespread Fraud, Actually?

To test whether Renninger’s example reflects a broader pattern, CN&V applied the best available national fraud-detection data to Clay County’s own exemption numbers.

VA Office of Inspector General data cited by the Disabled American Veterans (DAV), a veterans service organization, shows fewer than 200 fraud convictions against the nearly 3 million claims VA processes annually — a rate of roughly 0.01%, or one one-hundredth of one percent.

A separate estimate, drawn from the VA OIG’s roughly 63 annual fraud investigations involving 6.9 million beneficiaries, yields an even lower rate of about 0.001%.

Applying either rate to Clay County’s exemption population produces a predicted fraud count of less than one person:

• 4,565 exemption holders (Property Appraiser count) × 0.0001 (OIG conviction rate) ≈ 0.5 people

• 3,700 exemption holders (county staff count) × 0.0001 ≈ 0.4 people

• Using the lower 0.001% investigation-rate figure, the predicted count drops to roughly 0.05 people at the higher parcel count

In other words: if Clay County’s disabled veterans defraud the VA at the same rate documented nationally, the math predicts statistically close to zero fraudulent cases among local exemption holders — not the kind of widespread abuse that would justify a blanket policy change affecting every recipient.

That said, this comparison comes with real caveats. Conviction and investigation rates measure how much fraud gets caught, not necessarily how much occurs — a distinction a 2025 Washington Post investigation raised directly, arguing true fraud prevalence is likely undercounted because it is difficult to detect and under-resourced to investigate.

National rates also may not translate precisely to a single county’s population, particularly one as small as Clay County’s exemption pool. Even accounting for that uncertainty, however, nothing in the available data suggests fraud anywhere near the scale implied by treating one anecdote as representative.

And the fraud data that does exist doesn’t distinguish between legitimate schedular high-earners, like Renninger’s FedEx pilot example, and actual rule violations, meaning even a “true” fraud count wouldn’t capture the scenario he described in the first place.

Renninger’s Response

CN&V reached out to Commissioner Renninger with questions about the scope of the issue he described, but did not receive a response.

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Clay County Sheriff’s Office announced Sunday it will remove license plate reader cameras “from Clay County roadways,” a decision the agency says was forced by a new memo from the Florida Department of Transportation.

But a close read of the state’s order raises questions the Sheriff’s Office has not yet answered — including whether the mandate actually covers most of the cameras Clay County has installed, and whether the public will ever see where those cameras are.

What The FDOT Memo Actually Says

FDOT’s Engineering and Operations Memorandum No. 26-01, dated August 31, 2026, revokes “General Use Permits” that allow local law enforcement agencies to place automated license plate readers (LPRs) in the right-of-way of roads on the State Highway System.

Citing its authority under Florida Statute 316.0777, the department states that a permit holder, meaning the local agency, in this case CCSO, has 30 days to remove any LPR devices placed in that right-of-way, or FDOT will remove them itself. The memo also permanently ends FDOT’s issuance of new LPR placement permits going forward.

Critically, the memo cites “concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes” as the reason for the order—language that goes well beyond a routine permitting technicality and signals the state sees this as a policy response to the ongoing, and increasingly national, backlash against ALPR networks like Flock Safety’s.

But the memo’s authority is narrow by design. FDOT’s right-of-way jurisdiction covers only the State Highway System — interstates, U.S. highways, and state roads. It does not extend to county roads, city streets, or private property, all of which remain entirely outside FDOT’s control.

What CCSO’s Announcement Says — And Doesn’t

Sheriff Michelle Cook’s press release states plainly that “all License Plate Readers will be removed from Clay County roadways” in response to the FDOT memo. That is broader language than the memo itself requires. FDOT ordered the removal of LPRs from state highway right-of-way—not from every road in Clay County.

That gap is critical because it is not clear how many of CCSO’s cameras are actually in FDOT’s jurisdiction versus on county-controlled roads, where the state memo has no legal force at all.

CCSO holds a Flock Safety contract covering at least 95 cameras placed at locations across roadways throughout Clay County. The Sheriff’s Office has never released documentation identifying the specific locations of those cameras.

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Neither the public nor, as far as records show, CN&V can independently verify how many of the 95 sit on state right-of-way subject to the FDOT order, and how many sit on county roads, which the memo doesn’t address.

That leaves several open questions:

• Is CCSO removing all 95 roadway cameras, or only the subset actually on state right-of-way? The wording of the press release suggests the former, but the FDOT memo only requires the latter.

• If CCSO is removing cameras beyond what FDOT required, is that a voluntary policy decision—and if so, why wasn’t it framed that way?

• What happens to the parks and gun-range cameras? Those cameras, documented in separate Flock Safety contracts (2023/2024-314 for parks, 2022/2023-250 for the gun range), are not on state highway right-of-way and would not appear to be covered by the FDOT memo at all. CCSO’s release does not mention them.

• Will the locations of the removed—or remaining—cameras be disclosed? Without a public accounting of where the 95 roadway cameras are, there is no way to confirm compliance with the FDOT order, let alone evaluate what surveillance capability the county retains once the 30-day removal window closes.

Accountability Matters

CCSO’s release leans heavily on ALPR success stories—a missing 76-year-old woman located in Middleburg, a homicide suspect identified, a child safely recovered near the Florida-Alabama line—to frame the removal as a loss for public safety rather than a response to any wrongdoing on the department’s part. Sheriff Cook said the decision “does not hinder, nor sway” the office’s ability to fight crime.

That framing sidesteps the more specific accountability question this outlet has been pursuing: Not whether ALPR technology has value, but where, specifically, it has been deployed, under what policy, and with what oversight —questions that remain unanswered for a 95-camera network whose map the public has never been shown.

This is a news release issued today by the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office:

At this time, Sheriff H.D. “Gator” DeLoach has directed automated license plate reader cameras to be disconnected immediately and removed within 30 days. In total the sheriff’s office had 18 cameras on major roadways in Putnam County.

“Over the past several weeks, legitimate questions have continued to emerge regarding privacy, data sharing, governmental oversight and the future regulation of this technology,” DeLoach said. “I believe the responsible course is to discontinue our program and cancel our contract at this time.”

The decision follows continuing developments surrounding the use of automated license plate recognition systems in Florida, as well as a rapidly evolving statewide and national discussion concerning privacy, data sharing and the appropriate limits of government use of this technology.

“This was not a decision I made lightly. ALPR technology has proven to be a valuable law-enforcement tool, but I have become increasingly concerned that the technology is advancing faster than the laws and regulations governing its use. Until that framework catches up and provides clearer, more consistent safeguards for both public safety and individual privacy, I believe discontinuing the program is the most responsible course for our agency and the community we serve.” DeLoach said.

ALPRs were first placed in Putnam County in 2022 and have helped successfully locate Alzheimer’s and those with early stages of dementia who have become disoriented while on the road, they have also helped us track and arrest murder suspects, as well as earlier this year helped the sheriff’s office and FBI locate a teenage victim of human trafficking from another state.

“Automated license plate readers are an effective law-enforcement tool, and I’ve seen firsthand how they can help us locate dangerous offenders, recover stolen vehicles, kidnapping victims, and solve serious crimes. I also believe, however, that effective law enforcement requires the trust and confidence of the people we serve,” DeLoach said.

At the sheriff’s office extensive protocols were in place to ensure proper usage of ALPRs including a case number associated with use and quarterly audits of information being accessed. However, camera usage by other law enforcement agencies and private residents have opened up situations of misuse nationwide.

“I remain confident that our deputies used this technology lawfully, responsibly and in accordance with some of the strongest safeguards we could put in place. This decision is not an indictment of their work, nor does it mean the technology has no legitimate law-enforcement value. It simply means that when the rules, public expectations and regulatory environment surrounding a technology are changing this rapidly, we should be willing to reevaluate whether continuing to use it is in the best interest of our community,” DeLoach said.

Therefore, until there is further direction and laws created by the state legislature giving law enforcement parameters and guidance, the sheriff’s office is discontinuing use of the cameras and the accompanying technology.

“Public safety matters. So does individual liberty. Neither should be treated casually,” DeLoach said.

1,173 Days and Counting

As we have several times in the past, Clay News and Views invites Sheriff Michelle Cook to come on our podcast and explain why she thinks the benefits of Flock cameras outweigh any threats to our personal liberty. It may be worth noting that Cook is friendly with Gator DeLoach, having had him as as guest on her podcast.

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Clay News & Views Co-Founder Josh Allen recently sat down with Tracy Rigdon and Jim Alabiso on their podcast, One World with Tracy and Jim, for a wide-ranging conversation about independent journalism, local news, and what happens to a community when nobody consistently watches the decisions that shape it.

Tracy and Jim approach politics from a different place than Josh does, and that was kind of the point — this was a conversation about whether people with different views can still agree that facts matter and that public officials should be held accountable.

They got into a lot: Clay County as a “news desert,” the pressures and pushback that come with covering a small community, and one of journalism’s most uncomfortable subjects — bias.

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Allen doesn’t buy the idea that reporters approach stories with a blank slate, free of experience, belief, or blind spots.

CN&V was built around the opposite idea: separate the news from the views, but don’t pretend the views aren’t there. Say them out loud instead of hiding them.

They also talked about the gap between demanding accountability and actually showing up for it — attending meetings, filing records requests, doing the unglamorous work that keeps a community informed.

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In May of this year, the County agreed to pay $1.5 million to renovate an office in Fleming Island being used by the Clay County Sheriff’s Office.

Per the contract, Brogdon Builders, LLC manager Clayton Brogdon was contracted to complete a $1,604,255.50 renovation of Building 500 at the Fleming Island Business Park.

The building houses the agency's Human Resources and Finance divisions, as well as some training facilities.

Three weeks later, at a June 9, 2026 budget workshop, county staff told commissioners they were facing a projected General Fund deficit of more than $44.5 million heading into the next fiscal year, driven largely by a sharp slowdown in the development activity that has fueled county revenue growth in recent years.

Framed on its own, that timeline might suggest the county signed a significant capital contract just before an unexpected fiscal shock became known.

A review of county records and prior local reporting complicates that reading: Clay County had already been publicly describing its finances in terms of a “shortfall” — and naming Sheriff’s Office funding specifically — nearly a year earlier, in the summer of 2025.

What The County Bought

The Building 500 project renovates existing interior space at 1845 Town Center Boulevard. Per the bid documents and signed agreement, the scope includes two new training rooms (the Base Bid, priced at $1,493,255.50), a new conference room (Alternate Bid No. 1, $31,000), and new cubicle and private office space (Alternate Bid No. 2, $80,000).

The Board of County Commissioners awarded all three components on April 28, 2026, selecting Brogdon Builders as the lowest responsive and responsible bidder for Invitation for Bid No. 25/26-061.

The stated purpose, per the agreement, is to “consolidate training functions into a centralized location” and improve workspace configurations for CCSO’s current and future operational needs.

The largest single line items in Brogdon’s price breakdown are mechanical/HVAC work ($366,850) and audiovisual equipment ($229,905.50), together more than a third of the Base Bid, followed by electrical work ($168,300) and interior doors and frames ($116,600).

The contract sets a 345-calendar-day window from Notice to Proceed to Substantial Completion, with liquidated damages of $500 for every day the project runs past that deadline.

Fiscal Cracks Begin To Show

Clay County’s fiscal strain did not begin in June 2026. In late June 2025, the county proposed raising its Public Service Utility Tax — a charge on electric and gas bills for unincorporated county residents, including Clay Electric customers — from 4% to 10%, the maximum rate allowed under Section 166.231(1)(a), Florida Statutes, and the first change to that tax since 2004.

The county’s own Business Impact Estimate, published July 3, 2025, stated plainly that the increase was intended “to fund shortfalls in the County’s budget such as for essential Public Safety services” — explicitly naming the kind of funding category CCSO falls under. At the maximum rate, the tax was projected to generate about $7.4 million a year; Clay Electric estimated it would add roughly $72 a year to the average member’s bill.

The Board rejected the increase 4-1 on July 8, 2025. Commissioner Alexandra Compere called it a short-term fix: “I’m very uncomfortable with making a decision that only addresses today... these are short-term solutions, and as the years continue, those figures get exponentially higher.”

She favored a broader revenue mechanism, like a sales tax, instead. Board Chair Betsy Condon, describing herself as a fiscal conservative, proposed a county-level spending review before considering new revenue, saying, “I don’t think we’ve looked under every rock, and our constituents demand it of us.” Both commissioners suggested revisiting the question later in the year after the county looked for savings elsewhere.

Two months later, at the September 9, 2025 first public hearing on the FY2025-2026 budget, Assistant County Manager Troy Nagle told commissioners the county’s general fund reserves stood at $22,350,733 — about $1.5 million less than the year before — and that the county’s cash carry-forward was down roughly $83 million year over year.

The overall budget remained balanced as required by Florida statute, and Nagle noted that the county still met the Government Finance Officers Association's reserve recommendations. But the reserve decline was flagged to commissioners as “a point” even then, a full nine months before the $44.5 million figure became public.

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What Changed Between 2025 and 2026

Part of the answer traces to Tallahassee. Throughout 2025, Governor Ron DeSantis pushed to eliminate property taxes on homesteaded properties statewide, calling them “basically paying rent to the government to live on your own property.”

House Speaker Daniel Perez favored a different approach and, in September 2025, rolled out a slate of seven competing House proposals ranging from a 10-year phase-out to targeted exemptions. None of those proposals passed before the 2026 regular session ended.

Rather than let the debate die, DeSantis called a special session, and on June 1-3, 2026, the Legislature passed HJR 1-F — now known as Amendment 3 — placing a constitutional amendment on the November 3, 2026 ballot that would raise the homestead exemption to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028, and cut the assessment cap on non-homestead property from 10% to 5%. It requires 60% voter approval to take effect.

The Legislature’s own Revenue Estimating Conference has projected Amendment 3 would cost local governments and school districts roughly $12 billion a year on a recurring basis if approved — on top of, and separate from, the $44.5 million General Fund deficit Clay County disclosed in June, which county officials have said does not yet factor in any Amendment 3 impact.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, an outspoken critic, has called the amendment “a train wreck” that would hit public safety funding and response times statewide.

That two-year run-up — a governor publicly campaigning to zero out property taxes, a House speaker countering with his own slate of cuts, and a special session that finally put a specific, costed amendment on the ballot — is the backdrop Clay County commissioners were watching when they rejected the 2025 utility tax increase and again when they confronted the 2026 deficit.

What’s not yet clear from the public record is how directly that statewide fight shaped the county’s own budget planning in the interim, or whether the $170 million year-over-year drop in new taxable value that Property Appraiser Tracy Drake cited in June 2026 was itself anticipated back in mid-2025, when commissioners chose to defer a revenue fix rather than adopt one.

It is also unclear whether the county pursued any of the “cuts in other places” that Compere and Condon both said they wanted to see before revisiting a tax increase — and if so, what those cuts were and whether they materialized before the FY2025-2026 budget was finalized.

Where Did The Money Come From?

Nothing in the Building 500 agreement, the bid documents, or the attachments identifies the specific fund behind the $1.6 million contract price. Clay County maintains separate capital improvement and enterprise funds for some infrastructure work, so it is not automatic that this project draws on the same General Fund now facing the deficit — but the contract itself is silent on the question.

CN&V has not yet identified a budget line item that confirms the funding source. That distinction matters for how the project should be read against both the 2025 warnings and the 2026 deficit: a project funded from capital dollars set aside before the revenue decline sits differently than one drawn from the same pool commissioners are now trying to shore up.

Budgets Growing Faster Than Inflation

This is not the first time Clay County’s overall spending trajectory has come under scrutiny. CN&V has previously reported that the county’s total budget rose from $399 million in 2022 to an estimated $571 million in 2026 — a 43 percent increase over five years, more than triple the roughly 12 percent inflation seen over the same period. County officials have pushed back on an earlier, larger growth figure that included cash reserves alongside the operating budget, but did not dispute the 43 percent figure for the budget itself.

What’s Not Public

Under Section 119.071(3)(b), Florida Statutes, the building plans, schematics, and security-related specifications for the Building 500 project are exempt from public disclosure, meaning the detailed design behind the $1.6 million price tag cannot be independently reviewed by the public.

The bid documents also required the awarded contractor to self-perform at least 40 percent of the work with its own workforce, a standard county requirement intended to limit reliance on subcontractors.

What’s Next

CN&V has asked the county whether the Building 500 contract is funded through the General Fund, whether it was budgeted in the adopted FY2025-2026 budget or added later, whether commissioners were shown any shortfall projections before the April 28 award, and whether the county considered scaling back the two alternates given its fiscal picture.

CN&V has also asked the county to detail what, if any, budget cuts were identified or implemented following the July 2025 vote to reject the utility tax increase, and whether county staff anticipated the scale of the FY2026-2027 deficit at that time.

Okay, Sheriff Michelle Cook, you’ve lost our governor on the issue of privacy versus Flock roadside cameras. You’ve lost Ron DeSantis, the most law-and-order governor in the country.

You cannot deny that there is a nationwide backlash against these license-reading, data-storing, artificial intelligence creations. Depending on whom you ask, there are between 7,000 and 10,000 of them across the state.

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“Out of control” was DeSantis’ description of the surveillance network now recording motorist movement throughout Florida and here at home, adding:

Go after criminals? Great, let’s do all that. But surveilling just regular Floridians’ movements and how that data is used? That’s a bird of a different feather. I don’t want to be in a situation where these tech companies know everything about you and where you’re going. And I know they collect a lot as it is, but I think it’s going to get a lot worse unless we have some protections for the people in Florida. The only way it could be dealt with is legislatively.

This should be a come-to-Jesus moment for you, madame sheriff.

We have counted the days: 1,170 have passed since your office installed license plate reading cameras throughout the county—without ever having discussed your plan with the people who live here. No vote was ever taken.

Not so much as a “by your leave.”

Please, please, Sheriff Cook, be a guest on our podcast. Or if you prefer, let us interview you. The people of Clay County deserve to hear your side of the story amidst the din of national and statewide debate.

We have dutifully showed up when you have summoned us to be chewed out by you. The least you can do is to show our citizens some respect and agree to a civil conversation with us.

Kristen Burke may be used to turning heads. Going forward, she had better get used to seeing a glare on the associated faces.

Cue more chiropractor jokes.

Hey, did you hear the one about County Commissioner Burke being willing to change her stormwater vote? All it will take is eight to 10 regularly scheduled public hearings.

The picture of her fiddling on her phone, hidden behind her laptop, as the commission meeting burned with indignation was getting a lot of traction on Facebook yesterday. Publicity-wise, the therapeutic wobble chair-woman was having a no good, very bad day.

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That photo turned out to be the straw that broke the Facebook camel’s back, so to speak.

“I don’t care what the voters say I’m playing on my phone and being rude to them, peasants taking up my time,” Charles Hodges quipped.

“The way she talked to the people last night I will NEVER step foot in her business again. She will never see another dime of my hard earned money,” Lauren Davis said.

Brandon Leino said he would find some other way to deal with his pain rather than attend her chiropracty. (Yes, that’s a word.)

Plenty of commenters predicted her Fleming Island crack-tice may have to adjust to economic hard times. Others called for an outright boycott or an outporing of one-star reviews.

Not a quip but an indictment from Sherry Gonyon:

When she argued with that older gentleman towards the end who asked her to please pay attention and not look at her phone, I was just blown away. She sounded like a petulant child. Those people have three minutes to speak, you can look at your phone between speakers. Just wow. I get it was a long night, but he waited HOURS to have those three minutes.

“She's one arrogant, miserable bitch,” said Robert Phillips, his choice of words milder than those of some of the others sharing his sentiments.

A suburban witch named Zette Fleming actually put a curse on Burke or, more accurately, her landscaping: “May chinch bugs devour that complacent, self-absorbed woman’s lawn to the point she can’t afford the fines and replacement sod for the rest of her days.”

Ouch!

“Remember after a couple of hours, someone brought her a cord to charge her phone? She likely ran down the battery playing Candy Crush,” Brian Driver said.

(Dear Brian, you are obviously unaware of the mobile app Chiropractor 3D featuring doctor-patient adjustment gameplay.)

So, we know who Tuesday’s big loser was. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the big winner going to be Amendment 3?

Oh, and you can probably forget about that pay raise.

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The Board of County Commissioners voted Tuesday to enact a newly proposed stormwater fee. Hundreds of Clay County citizens filled the meeting room, an overflow room, the lobby of the building, and much of the parking lot to speak against the new tax.

Public comments on the proposed fee began around 5:45 pm and continued for over five hours. Resident after resident spoke against the fee and outlined concerns ranging from not being able to afford the new tax to not gaining any benefit from the list of proposed projects.

Only Commissioner Alexandra Compere sat through the entire public comments session, giving the speakers her full attention. She received praise from several speakers for actually listening. She is the only Commissioner who has consistently voted against the new fee.

Board Chair Kristen Burke appeared frustrated with some of the people speaking, threatening to eject attendees for standing, clapping, or speaking out of turn.

Commissioners John Sgromolo and Jim Renninger read remarks that were clearly prepared ahead of the meeting, suggesting they had already made up their minds before hearing from the public. Kristen Burke had a pre-made list of cost savings enacted by the county that she alleged show the county has cut as much as it could before considering new taxes.

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Betsy Condon lamented the mean things people said online about the County Commissioners and county staff, but said she could not support the fee as it was currently constituted.

The County Commission has been considering the new fee since at least November of 2025, and has used two consulting firms to determine the scope and details of the tax. Commissioner Condon voted for the tax at that November meeting and again in July of this year.

The same sort of fee was voted down in 2019, and over the subsequent seven years, the county took few steps to address the list of projects and needs that it says precipitate this new tax.

Ultimately, the commission voted to adopt the ordinance and fee with a reduced amount. Only Commissioners Condon and Compere voted against the measure. The Stormwater fee will go into effect on October 1st, 2026.

After enacting the new fee, the Commission voted to reduce the Veteran exemption for the county’s garbage fee from a full exemption to 50%.

Colin Groff may well be Clay County’s foremost expert on our controversy du jour—stormwater. Over his 40 years as a civil engineer he has set up “seven or eight” municipal stormwater utilities. His company is Black Creek Engineering.

Most recently, he was the key figure in forcing Green Cove Springs to reimburse a commercial landowner after it unlawfully screwed him out of $187,000 in stormwater fees. Compared to that the Clay County proposes to assess homeowners between $51 and $162 a year, depending on “impervious surface area.”

What the city was doing to that one landowner was transparently unlawful, Groff said.

Although this may disappoint residents up in arms about a newly instituted stormwater fee for homeowners in Clay’s unincorporated areas, Groff believes that the county’s plans comply with state laws regarding stormwater.

However, having spent much of his career working as a goverment water boss—he mentioned St. Johns and Nassau counties—he said our county commissioners have failed miserably at communication with the public regarding the fee.

Groff also believes there should be a reduction in property taxes to offset at least some of the fee revenue.

Under the weight of federal law, the very rainy State of Florida issues “MS 4” permits to munipalities requiring that they control stormwater and any resulting pollution. In a classic example of an “unfunded mandate,” there’s a list of things a city or country must do to comply, including installation and maintenance of ditches, water pipes and retention ponds.

The state allows a two-pronged approach to pay for all this.

So far, Clay has collected part one—the base fee—as a tax collected from businesses and homeowners and paid from the general fund. Everybody in the county is going to have to pay it because everybody enjoys the benefits of it,” Groff said. “So they did all that correctly.”

The second revenue stream, so to speak, is a users fee, and today the commissioners are supposed to decided how much it’s going to cost.

“It’s considered an assessment in the state of Florida. And you can only assess people’s property for a direct benefit,” Groff said.

The uproar comes from a distinction between what many citizens see as “direct benefit” and how the state defines that term. As long as the projects funded by the users fee do not, for example, solely benefit a particular development, they can be considered “a general benefit.”

Groff himself owns 55 acres unconnected to any county drainage infrastructure. “None of my water goes off my property. But I do drive on the roads,” he said. “And all of that general maintenance of making sure stormwater is being handled properly benefits everybody in the county.”

Groff has examined the legal language that establishes the fee. “Their ordinance is written well within state statutes. There’s no issue in the ordinance. The only mistake they could make is if they had a project that has a direct benefit to somebody,” he said.

A quick examination of the list of projects raised no red flags for Groff, but maybe a couple gray areas. Opponents could question decisionmakers, forcing them to explain why specific projects benefit everybody.

Clay County Stormwater Project List

64.7KB ∙ PDF file

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Groff mentioned one of the projects specifically, the one regarding the Dudley Branch Creek. “Their going to upgrade the culverts on some roads. “Does it directly benefit people that drive on those roads? Yeah. But if people cannot drive on those roads, they’re going to have to maybe drive on your roads.”

To the extent that some of these project had been paid for from the general fund up until now, Groff said county commissioners should pledge to offset the shift to a fee-based system by a proportional reduction in the “millage rate,” the number upon which property taxes are determined.

In fact, the elephant that will be somewhere in room with commissioners later today, is Amendment 3 on the November ballot. If passed, Amendment 3 would cut property taxes by a whole lot and force heavier reliance on fees to pay for goods and services.

Which is fine by Groff. He believes government should be funded through fees, not taxes on land and homes. That way every department head would have to justify the fee amount to the public, rather than drawing from an amorphous general fund that defies scrutiny.

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It appears the folks we’ve hired to run the county store are telling us the cash register is empty. Now, they want us to refill it—or else.

Several weeks ago, homeowners received The Letter from the county. The missive said that come November, the county plans to make us pay taxes on rain.

They’re calling it “stormwater fees,” which will be levied on homeowners and businesses in “unincorporated areas “ of Clay. The correspondence said the money is to fix stormwater drainage issues around the county—but even if you live on a sand hill with no drainage problem, you still have to pay it. And there’s only a guesstimate of what the fees will be, but the message suggests they will continue to rise.

The county says they need $9 million a year for the foreseeable future— meaning long after many of us are dead.

The charge will appear on our tax bill, but the county is not calling it a “tax.” This is an important distinction, because residents get to vote on taxes, they don’t on fees.

The letter was clearly written by a lawyer(s), as parts of it were so confusing, residents needed a lawyer to explain the legalese. But there was an unmistakable threat that needed no explaining: Don’t pay the fee, the county will take your home.

Threat Behind The Threat

Clay County has an embarrassing and well-documented history of overspending: two sheriffs, a clerk of court, a county manager, the tax collector and more county commissioners that we can count.

Consequently, lots of residents believe the stormwater fee is not only a plan to raise a chunk of money for the county to spend on whatever they want, but also to intimidate county residents into voting against Amendment 3—which will allow money to flow away from the county and back to homeowners. This may be the real reason some officials want us to believe if Amendment 3 passes the county will be in a fiscal hole.

Clay News and Views previously covered Amendment 3, but here’s a recap.

It is on the November ballot and gives homeowners a much-needed break from ever-growing property taxes. The amendment increases the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027, then sets the exemption at $250,000 in 2028.

Before The Letter was sent, officials bragged in the media and on the county website that they operated a “lean budget.”

Apparently, “lean” has a flexible definition, because a few weeks later they dropped a bomb which some believe was yet another attempt to stop Amendment 3: “Oh, by the way, we’re $35 million in debt.”

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Squeezing Residents

The stormwater fee is worrisome and contentious for taxpayers all around the county. Nevertheless, county employees said some commissioners and administrators pushing for the fees came up with their own humorous little ditty that boils the debate down to a simple refrain: “The juice is worth the squeeze.”

The squeezers, however, may not find it so funny when they discover county homeowners are harder to squeeze than they thought.

With little notice, about 200 people showed up last Friday on a miserably hot summer night for a meeting at the Middleburg Civic Center concerning the new fee. There were different faces and diverse backgrounds, but one common thread stitched them together throughout the room in a tight weave—anger. And they plan to show up en masse to fight the fee's passage, as Clay Citizens did six years ago.

In 2019, the then-Board of County Commissioners (BCC) contemplated a fix for drainage issues in the county. After listening to a large group of county citizens’ pleas to squash the stormwater fees, the BCC decided against the charges. They promised to find other “options” to fund drainage.

The present BCC is apparently sending those “options” down the storm drain. On Tuesday at 4 p.m., the Board of County Commissioners will vote on the stormwater fee.

Spoiler Alert

Seems the stormwater vote has already been decided. Commissioner Condon will vote “no.” Commissioners Burke, Renninger and Sgromolo will vote “yes” and Commissioner Compere is on the fence.

Insiders said commissioners and county administrators in favor of the fee would not have put the issue on the agenda for a final vote unless they already knew they had the votes to pass it.

There is a small wrinkle, however, in the alleged preplanned vote at next Tuesday’s meeting. Condon acted within the Sunshine Law because she publicly assured her constituents she is against the fee. However, if other commissioners discussed the issue with each other or passed information with surrogates before the meeting, the vote could be squashed and the commissioners charged with breaking Florida’s Sunshine Law. But proving it may be difficult.

Spoiler Alert: The Sequel

It appears the show will go on regardless of possible violations.

So sources say to bring your pillows as the plan for the meeting is that the commission will roll out a lineup of “experts.” They’re planning mind-numbing displays and speeches to either put residents to sleep or convince them to “trust us,” shut up, and pay the fee—because apparently, they want residents to think the county is on the verge of becoming a swamp.

Folks in the know said commissioners and surrogates are planning to tell residents that they, and their Department of Government Efficiency (DODE), have worked tirelessly to cut costs and find other monies for stormwater repairs, but to no avail. Presenters plan to pat themselves on the back because of specific cuts they made in the budget—in particular with how the county has not replaced 50 people who retired or left. If they follow their preplanned script—that raises a rather awkward question—why were 50 dispensable people even on the payroll in the first place?

Those privy to the rehearsals for the county’s meetings said presenters have yet another plan. The will attempt to convince attendees that the county cannot takes funds from other parts of the budget, because they must spend massive amounts on public safety needs which have increased dramatically due to the county’s massive growth spurt.

Anyone who has spent time driving around our area is already well-aware that the county has allowed builders and developers to stuff homes into our county like Vienna Sausages in a can. But odds are, the money spent by the county on infrastructure for developers will most likely not be mentioned.

A former commissioner told CN&V that infrastructure was not built by the county in the early 90’s. He said Clay, like many other counties, required developers to build infrastructure before development could take place. This kept county expenses and millage rates low. However, the commissioner said, influential developers helped to facilitate a deal for the county to buy Clay Utilities. Afterward, requirements for infrastructure were “magically removed.”

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Facts and Friction

To ensure that folks are armed with accurate information before the meeting, here’s a few facts.

Mr. Google says in 2024, the typical millage rate recorded for counties with populations between 225,000 and 674,999 was 5.4838. Clay County’s population is about 240,000, and our millage rate is 5.5471. If added together, the average millage rate of all counties, large and small, across the state is 6.5308.

Experts in government finances told CN&V they believed the county’s advertised millage rate was misleading. The published millage is only the “countywide services” portion of the county's tax revenue, they said, not the “actual revenue” received.

Those knowledgeable said in FY 2025-26, Clay County added a 0.2 mill “conservation land” tax and other taxes called Municipal Service Taxing Units (MSTUs). This puts the total of our real millage at 8.8010.

This means the county is getting more spending money than they’re saying.

The same experts say renters will also be affected by the stormwater fees. Rent, already high in the county, will be rising as landlords pass the fees on to their renters. Those in apartments will certainly be affected, as fees will be charged based on the size of roofs, driveways, and parking lots. This will also be a large hit for businesses.

Dear Commissioners: Let Us Help

Given the county’s misadventures with taxpayer monies in the past, some residents have an idea they plan to run by the commission on Tuesday night. They want to form a committee of knowledgeable people in the county, chosen by residents not the commission, to come together to review the budget to see where the money is being spent and where cuts can possibly be made. The’d also like the commission to hold off on the vote while they form the committee.

Nevertheless, CN&V has complete confidence that commissioners will agree to the taxpayers’ requests—when Hell freezes over.

Worried and Wondering

The county’s stormwater plan has no exceptions for hardship cases.

As the stormwater issue plays out, CN&V continues to talk with homeowners from different corners of the county. They were initially thrilled at the possibility of getting a break on their burdensome homeowner taxes if Amendment 3 passed. One resident said she had planned to get back on her blood pressure medication. But even with the passage, she said, the new fee will now make it impossible for her to afford the meds.

Others are worried that a demand for more county money, especially the large and growing fee proposed for stormwater, could cause them to lose the homes they’ve spent a lifetime struggling to keep. For these residents, another bill to pay could be the final straw that breaks them.

It will be interesting to see if the county’s presentation will be modified, since enlightened readers have already had a look behind the curtain.

Even more interesting— Amendment 3 is not the only decision facing Clay’s voters in November. Also on the ballot is an amendment to give Clay County Commissioners a raise.

CN&V is going to go out on a limb to make a prediction. Come November, commissioners will discover the only thing Clay’s voters are interested in raising—is their eyebrows.

By HISTORICAL ARCHIVES CENTER STAFF

Clay Hill, an area just west of Middleburg, was a very rural place in the 1930s. Farming and logging were the mainstays, along with running the occasional moonshine still.

The heart of the community was its school, Clay Hill School. The first version was indeed a one-room schoolhouse. In the 1920’s, a larger four-room schoolhouse was built. It cost $12,000 and was 45 feet by 75 feet.

A sandy road led to the school, but back then dirt roads were the norm for Clay County. Schoolchildren walked to school, some with shoes and some without, and that sand got hot. In the 1950’s, when there were more children living farther away, a school bus would make the rounds picking up and dropping off kids.

Each student brought a lunch, some in a pail and some in a paper bag. There was a well at the school that provided cool, fresh water. No one was particularly wealthy, so when one student who was slightly better off started bringing sandwiches made with store bought white bread, all the kids wanted to trade lunch with her.

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Students had last names like Wilkinson, Hatcher, Mosley, Padgett, Manning, Starling, and Carter. Those families, just to name a few, were the pioneering stock of the Clay Hill, Maxville, and nearby Baldwin areas.

As the center of the Clay Hill community, the school also hosted other functions. It served as a dance hall, church on Sundays, voting precinct, and as political pulpit for local politicians. The political rallies brought folks from far and wide, and all were treated to a “basket dinner,” another name for a potluck. Fried chicken dinners were also a big draw.

The school had a Halloween festival every year, and parents, students, teachers, and community members all participated. Commencement ceremonies were the social highlight of the school year. Aside from the handing out of diplomas, there was music and performances from both the seniors as well as from the underclassman.

In 1949, a former teacher named Miss Lura Burgess described what it was like to live in Clay Hill in the 1940’s:

To me it was a joy to live in peace, quiet, and harmony when all the world is in chaos.…. plenty of sunshine the year round, plenty of Sulphur water to drink, plenty of fresh air, and the turpentine pines throw off a resin which is so soothing to the nerves. Gardens provide fresh green vegetables the year round. Always there are oranges and tangerines. Yes, it’s good living in Clay Hill.

Lura talked about her morning duties before the children arrived. “I built the fire first thing in the morning in the wood stove set in the center of the school classroom,” she said.

She then raised the American flag so the children could see it. “When they came in sight of the school, it’s a sort of lonely ceremony me out there singing by myself as the flag goes up, but it lends inspiration to the day, Lura said.

The Parent Teacher Association (PTA) was particularly active at the Clay Hill School. In 1955, the parents painted the school and erected a new flagpole. Steam heat radiators were installed, warming the school and replacing the wood stove. In 1957, the PTA tiled the cafeteria floor because it had fallen into disrepair.

The school was often used as a landmark for giving directions. For instance, “You pass the schoolhouse on your right then go another ½ mile and take the road heading west,” or, “Go half a mile south of the schoolhouse and you’ll see my place on the left.”

The schoolhouse was loved by Clay Hill, but changes were on the horizon that soon sealed its fate. In 1963, the school board conducted surveys with an eye toward closing schools and consolidating others. Clay Hill School was on the chopping block. In the mid-1960s, and despite the turn-out and the wishes of the parents and children, the Clay Hill School was shuttered.

The children of Clay Hill were bused to Middleburg. Gone were the days of walking to school with your friends, lunch boxes swinging.

In 1984, the current Clay Hill Elementary School was built on the same site as the old school, located on County Road 218.

For more information on this topic or to research anything related to Clay County history, please visit clayclerk.com to view the Historical Archives website pages.

The original building circa 1897-98. In this photo it is winter time, so you can notice that most students wore shoes, jackets, or shawls. Shoes were optional in the warm months.

The preliminary results are in for the three school board seats up for grabs here in Clay County. With approximately 2,000 votes left to be counted, all of the races can be called in favor of the incumbents.

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DISTRICT 1

DISTRICT 4

DISTRICT 5

Clay County voters cast 20,131 ballots before Tuesday’s primary election, according to figures released by the Supervisor of Elections office at the close of early voting Saturday — a pre-Election Day turnout of about 13.1 percent of the county’s 153,792 active registered voters.

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Republicans accounted for 13,586 of those ballots, or 67.5 percent. Democrats cast 4,979, or 24.7 percent. Voters registered with no party affiliation cast 1,367, and minor-party voters cast 199.

Those figures matter beyond the partisan primaries, because three Clay County School Board seats — Districts 1, 4 and 5 — appear on every ballot in the county regardless of party.

Clay’s five school board members are elected countywide on a nonpartisan basis, with each member required to reside in a different geographic district. Under Florida law, a school board candidate who wins a majority in the primary is elected outright.

Districts 1 and 4 each drew exactly two candidates, meaning both seats will almost certainly be decided Tuesday, with no November runoff.

Which makes the composition of this electorate consequential.

Share of the active roll vs. share of early ballots cast:

• Republican — 57.1 percent of registered voters, 67.5 percent of ballots

• Democratic — 20.0 percent of registered voters, 24.7 percent of ballots

• No party affiliation — 18.9 percent of registered voters, 6.8 percent of ballots

• Other — 4.0 percent of registered voters, 1.0 percent of ballots

Voters with no party affiliation make up nearly one in five registered voters in Clay County. They are casting roughly one in fifteen of the ballots that will decide three school board seats.

Figures in this article are drawn from the Supervisor of Elections’ early voting statistics released Aug. 15 and its July precinct summary of active and inactive registration dated Aug. 3. All turnout percentages are calculated against active registered voters, matching the office’s own methodology. Ballot totals do not include Election Day voting on Aug. 18, and mail ballots will continue to be accepted until 7 p.m. that day.

The Turnout Gap Is Not About Being Locked Out

Florida is a closed primary state: voters may cast ballots only in the partisan contests of the party with which they are registered. That fact is often invoked to explain low independent turnout — and it is a real constraint. But it does not explain what happened in Clay County this month, because NPA voters were not shut out.

A comparison of the three sample ballots shows what each voter received:

• Republican ballot — 7 contests, 26 candidates

• Democratic ballot — 8 contests, 22 candidates

• Nonpartisan (NPA) ballot — 3 contests, 7 candidates

Republican voters saw an open-seat governor’s race with 11 candidates, a four-candidate U.S. Senate primary, contested races for chief financial officer and commissioner of agriculture, and all three school board races. Democratic voters saw a six-candidate governor’s race, a two-candidate Senate primary, a three-way primary for the congressional seat in District 4, contested CFO and agriculture races, and the same three school board contests. Notably, no congressional primary appeared on the Republican ballot.

NPA voters received a ballot containing the three school board races and nothing else — three genuinely contested elections for seats governing a district that serves roughly 39,000 students and commands the largest single line in most Clay County property tax bills.

They turned out at 4.70 percent.

By comparison, Democrats turned out at 16.20 percent of active registration and Republicans at 15.47 percent. Had NPA voters participated at the Republican rate, they would have cast about 4,500 ballots instead of 1,367 — roughly 3,100 additional votes in three school board races that may be decided by far fewer.

The gap is not a question of access. Every NPA voter in Clay County was mailed a ballot or offered one with three real choices. The overwhelming majority declined.

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Democrats Out-Turned Republicans — Slightly

The 67.5 percent Republican share of the early vote reflects registration, not enthusiasm. Republicans hold 57.1 percent of Clay County’s active roll. Measured as a rate, Democrats voted at 16.20 percent and Republicans at 15.47 percent — a Democratic edge of about three-quarters of a percentage point.

The ballots make that comparison more meaningful than it might otherwise be. Both parties had contested primaries at the top of the ticket, and if anything the Republican ballot carried the heavier draw: an open governor’s race with 11 names and a four-way Senate contest.

Democrats had a smaller gubernatorial field and a two-candidate Senate race, offset by a contested congressional primary Republicans did not have.

That said, primary turnout rates are shaped by more than ballot length — party organization, mail programs, and the perceived competitiveness of individual races all contribute.

The finding here is narrow but defensible: Republicans produced two-thirds of Clay County’s early ballots because they have the voters, not because they showed up at a higher rate.

The Fastest-Growing Part of the County Voted Least

Turnout across Clay County’s 48 precincts ranged from 7.5 percent to 21.8 percent, with a median of 13.5 percent. Eight precincts came in below 10 percent.

Turnout by region, with ballots cast and active registered voters:

• Fleming Island (400s) — 17.9 percent · 3,945 ballots from 22,065 voters

• Orange Park (200s) — 15.0 percent · 2,670 ballots from 17,858 voters

• Green Cove Springs area (600s) — 13.0 percent · 2,868 ballots from 22,073 voters

• Middleburg/CR 220 (300s) — 12.7 percent · 1,808 ballots from 14,194 voters

• Lake Asbury/south Middleburg (500s) — 12.7 percent · 1,641 ballots from 12,958 voters

• Keystone Heights/Penney Farms (700s) — 12.6 percent · 1,462 ballots from 11,573 voters

• Oakleaf/Argyle/west Orange Park (100s) — 10.8 percent · 5,737 ballots from 53,071 voters

The 100-series precincts hold 34.5 percent of Clay County’s active registered voters — more than twice any other region — and produced the county’s lowest turnout by nearly two points.

The Oakleaf corridor also has the county’s highest NPA registration, at 20.9 percent, which offers an obvious explanation: more voters there had a three-race ballot rather than a seven- or eight-race one. But the data does not support that explanation either.

Recalculating turnout using only registered Democrats and Republicans as the denominator — setting the NPA question aside entirely — Oakleaf rises to 14.4 percent while Fleming Island rises to 22.6 percent. The gap does not close. It widens, from 7.1 percentage points to 8.1.

Oakleaf’s registered partisans, holding the same full-length ballots as everyone else, are voting less than partisans elsewhere in the county.

One Precinct Holds 6.8 Percent of the County’s Voters

Precinct 113, which votes at Oakleaf Baptist Church, contains 10,472 active registered voters — 42 percent more than the next-largest precinct in Clay County and nearly 29 times the size of the smallest, Precinct 700 at Kingsley Lake Civic Center, which has 363.

Precinct 113 turned out at 10.3 percent, producing 1,077 ballots. Had it voted at the countywide rate, it would have produced roughly 1,371 — the largest single-precinct shortfall in the county. It is also Clay’s most politically balanced large precinct, with 4,001 registered Democrats, 3,409 Republicans and 2,567 NPA voters.

The lowest turnout in the county belonged to Precinct 128 at Calvary Methodist Church, at 7.5 percent — 142 ballots from 1,893 active voters. Precinct 128 also carries Clay’s highest inactive-voter rate, at 30.9 percent.

At the other end, Penney Farms Town Hall led the county at 21.8 percent, followed by three Fleming Island precincts: River Christian Church at 20.5 percent, Orange Cove Seventh-day Adventist at 20.1 percent and Hibernia Baptist Church at 19.3 percent.

A Reversal in How Each Party Votes

Countywide, 7,681 ballots arrived by mail (38.2 percent) and 12,447 were cast in person at early voting sites (61.8 percent). Three provisional ballots were cast.

Broken out by party, the split reverses:

• Democratic — 51.0 percent by mail, 49.0 percent in person

• Republican — 31.0 percent by mail, 69.0 percent in person

• No party affiliation — 60.1 percent by mail, 39.9 percent in person

• Other — 52.3 percent by mail, 47.7 percent in person

Republicans in Clay County are now the in-person early voting party, and Democrats are the mail party — an inversion of the pattern that held in Florida for most of the two decades before 2020, when Republicans built and dominated the state’s absentee operation.

The pattern appears geographically as well. Mail share by precinct ranged from 27.1 percent at Black Creek Church of Christ to 70.5 percent at Penney Farms Town Hall.

Precinct 606 at First Presbyterian Church in Green Cove Springs — one of the county’s more Democratic precincts, and its fourth-largest — ran 70.0 percent mail, casting 625 of its 893 ballots that way.

It is worth noting that NPA voters, whose three-race ballot gave them the least reason to make a trip, were the most mail-reliant group of all at 60.1 percent.

Early Voting Built to a Final-Day Surge

In-person early voting ran Aug. 8 through Aug. 15. Daily in-person totals:

• Saturday, Aug. 8 — 1,284

• Sunday, Aug. 9 — 740

• Monday, Aug. 10 — 1,405

• Tuesday, Aug. 11 — 1,519

• Wednesday, Aug. 12 — 1,244

• Thursday, Aug. 13 — 1,501

• Friday, Aug. 14 — 1,924

• Saturday, Aug. 15 — 2,830

The final Saturday produced more than twice the volume of any other day and nearly four times the opening Sunday, the slowest of the period. Counting mail ballots received the same day, Aug. 15 accounted for 3,232 ballots — 16.1 percent of all pre-Election Day voting in a single day.

Clay County operated seven early voting sites. The Health Department building on Fleming Island was the busiest, with 2,953 ballots, followed by the Orange Park Library at 2,515 and the Middleburg Civic Center at 2,174.

Ballots cast at each site, with party breakdown:

• Middleburg Civic Center — 2,174 ballots · 87.2 percent Republican, 9.1 percent Democratic

• Keystone Heights City Hall — 803 ballots · 83.2 percent Republican, 13.8 percent Democratic

• Supervisor of Elections Office — 1,406 ballots · 82.6 percent Republican, 13.1 percent Democratic

• Health Department, Fleming Island — 2,953 ballots · 79.4 percent Republican, 15.4 percent Democratic

• Thrasher-Horne Conference Center — 1,251 ballots · 76.3 percent Republican, 18.4 percent Democratic

• Orange Park Library — 2,515 ballots · 69.0 percent Republican, 25.1 percent Democratic

• Eagle Landing Residents Club — 1,348 ballots · 45.3 percent Republican, 46.6 percent Democratic

Eagle Landing was the only site in the county where Democratic in-person voters outnumbered Republicans, and only narrowly. Its 628 Democratic ballots were the most of any site — more than the Health Department, Supervisor of Elections office, and the Middleburg and Keystone Heights sites combined.

Nearly 31,000 Voters Are Listed as “Inactive” — and the List Skews NPA

Beyond the 153,792 active voters, Clay County’s rolls carry 30,992 inactive registrations, or 16.8 percent of the total.

Inactive status is widely misunderstood. Under Florida Statute 98.065, failing to vote is not a penalty. A voter is designated inactive after being sent an address confirmation final notice and either failing to return the enclosed postage-prepaid form within 30 days or having the notice returned undeliverable. The notice is triggered by U.S. Postal Service change-of-address data, returned non-forwardable county mail, or address information from jury notices, the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, or similar sources. In practice, it is a test of mail deliverability — a proxy for people who have moved.

There is one exception: in odd-numbered years, supervisors using the postal-data method must also send final notices to voters who have not voted in the two preceding general elections or any intervening election and have not updated their registration in that time. 2025 was such a year.

Inactive voters may still vote, and doing so restores them to active status. But a voter who does not vote, request a mail ballot or update their registration by the second general election after being listed is removed from the statewide system entirely and must re-register.

The composition of the inactive list does not mirror the active roll:

• Republican — 57.1 percent of the active roll, 36.5 percent of the inactive roll

• No party affiliation — 18.9 percent of the active roll, 36.2 percent of the inactive roll

• Democratic — 20.0 percent of the active roll, 24.7 percent of the inactive roll

• Other — 4.0 percent of the active roll, 2.6 percent of the inactive roll

NPA voters are nearly twice as likely to appear on the inactive list as their share of registration would predict. Republicans are roughly a third less likely. If inactive status functions primarily as a measure of residential mobility, the disparity is consistent with a younger, more transient population that also registers NPA at higher rates — but the size of the gap invites a closer look.

Geographically, the inactive rate is highest in the 200-series Orange Park precincts at 20.1 percent and in the 100-series Oakleaf corridor at 18.8 percent. It is lowest on Fleming Island at 12.8 percent — the same region with the county’s highest turnout.

Florida law requires each supervisor to certify to the Department of State twice a year the number of address confirmation requests sent, voters designated inactive, and voters removed from the rolls. Those certifications are public records.

All Eyes on Tuesday

Polls open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 18. Election Day voters must vote at their assigned precinct. Mail ballots must be received by the Supervisor of Elections office — not postmarked — by 7 p.m. Tuesday, meaning the 7,681 mail figure reported at the close of early voting will grow.

School Board Districts 1 and 4, each a two-candidate race, will be resolved outright. District 5, with three candidates, advances to the November general election only if no candidate clears a majority.

The Board of County Commissioners has already adopted the ordinance creating the fee. What's left to decide on August 25 is how much it will cost — and county records suggest the true price tag may be larger and less settled than officials have said publicly.

Clay County property owners outside the county’s four incorporated cities will soon see a new line item on their tax bill: a stormwater assessment intended to pay for drainage repairs, flood control and water-quality upgrades across unincorporated Clay County.

The Board of County Commissioners voted July 28 to create the stormwater utility, formally adopting Ordinance No. 2026-33 and an accompanying resolution that sets an initial rate.

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A final public hearing on that rate is scheduled for 5 p.m. Tuesday, August 25, in the Board’s meeting room on the fourth floor of the County Administration Building, 477 Houston Street. Barring a change at that hearing, the fee takes effect October 1 and will first appear on tax bills mailed in November.

County officials have framed the fee as a modest, equitable fix for aging infrastructure. A review of the underlying rate study, ordinance, resolution, and the county’s own project list shows a more complicated picture.

A regulatory compliance problem behind the timing, a public cost estimate that appears to omit tens of millions of dollars in already identified work, and a rate structure that allows the fee to rise 41 percent above its starting point without the same public notice process required to establish it.

The fee applies only to developed property in unincorporated Clay County — Orange Park, Green Cove Springs, Keystone Heights and Penney Farms are excluded because they run their own stormwater programs.

It is based on a property’s impervious surface — roofs, driveways, patios, parking lots — rather than its assessed value, using a standard unit called an Equivalent Residential Unit, or ERU. One ERU equals 3,780 square feet of hard surface, roughly the median for a single-family home in the county.

For most homeowners, the bill will fall into one of three tiers:

• Tier 1 (400–2,825 sq. ft. of impervious surface): $51 a year

• Tier 2 (2,826–5,400 sq. ft.): $85 a year

• Tier 3 (more than 5,400 sq. ft.): $161.50 a year

Commercial and other non-residential properties are billed per ERU using the same $85 rate. Vacant land isn’t charged. Owners of multiple parcels pay separately for each.

Properties with a permitted private stormwater system can get a 25 percent reduction; residential parcels of five acres or more qualify for a 50 percent reduction; bona fide farm operations can be fully exempted.

Notably absent from that list: veterans and financial hardship cases. The county’s prior stormwater assessment program — a Municipal Service Benefit Unit created in 2003 — included exemptions for both. The new ordinance explicitly repeals those provisions.

It is not yet clear from public records whether the 2003 MSBU is being replaced outright by the new utility or will continue to operate alongside it, a distinction that matters for any property owner trying to figure out whether they’ve already been paying a version of this fee.

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Increased Tax Rate Baked In

The Board’s initial resolution sets the rate at $85 per ERU for the coming fiscal year — but it also establishes a ceiling of $120 per ERU that the Board can move to in future years.

That’s a 41 percent increase already written into county policy. Under the ordinance, a future increase up to that pre-approved ceiling does not appear to trigger the same individualized mailed notice and public hearing process that applies to the initial assessment. Only increases beyond $120 would require restarting the notice process.

Residents budgeting for $51 to $161.50 a year should understand that figure is a starting point, not a guarantee.

Consultants hired by the county, Jones Edmunds & Associates and Raftelis, modeled three funding paths before the county settled on its current approach. A faster, five-year capital investment plan would have meant a flat $135 per ERU.

A ten-year plan would have meant $105. The county chose the slowest option: a “10-year build-up” starting at $85 and climbing to $100 by 2031. That decision buys residents a lower bill now, but it also means the infrastructure work the fee is meant to fund will take longer to complete.

Compliance Issues

County officials have generally described the new fee as a proactive response to aging infrastructure. The consultants’ rate study tells a more specific story: the Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued the county a Notice of Non-Compliance in November 2024, following an audit of its stormwater program.

That finding is what led directly to the recommendation that the county create a dedicated stormwater utility — and to plans to hire a stormwater inspector specifically to address inspection gaps the state flagged.

The contents of that Notice of Non-Compliance have not been made public, and the county has not said whether it has since resolved the violation or whether compliance depends on the adoption of this fee.

Is It $30 million — Or Closer To $50 million?

The county has consistently cited “more than $30 million in needed capital improvements” as the justification for the fee. That figure traces to a 2025 Stormwater Master Plan prepared by Jones Edmunds, which priced out 12 projects at a planning level — from a $6.35 million overhaul of Gano Avenue to a $450,000 drainage fix in the Shannon Lake neighborhood.

Five additional projects on the list, including regional stormwater storage between County Road 220 and State Road 21, have no cost estimate at all yet, marked simply “TBD.” The county’s own rate study concedes it does not currently have a Commission-approved capital improvement plan; the $30 million figure is described as “the best available data,” not a final number.

A county list titled “General Repair and Maintenance” complicates the picture further. It itemizes 88 specific drainage repairs by street address, from underdrain replacement on Carter Spencer Road (over $2.5 million alone) to smaller cross-drain fixes throughout the county, for a total of roughly $21.2 million.

That list does not appear anywhere in the consultants’ rate study and is not reflected in the public $30 million figure. Whether it represents an additional, unfunded backlog on top of the $30 million capital plan — pushing the county’s total documented stormwater need closer to $50 million — or whether it’s meant to be absorbed into the utility’s annual operating budget is a question the county has not yet answered publicly.

That operating budget, for comparison, covers only about $1.6 million to $2.3 million a year for all “other services and charges” — a pace that would take roughly a decade to clear the maintenance list alone, even if none of that money were needed for anything else.

Fuzzy Numbers

The resolution formally adopted July 28 states the county expects to collect $9,244,095 in the fee’s first year. That figure is broken into three components — a management and improvement cost of $8,280,252, a collection cost of $362,358, and a statutory discount of $262,013 — that add up to $8,904,623, about $339,000 less than the total cited in the resolution. No explanation has been publicly offered for the gap in the projected numbers.

There’s also an open question about how many property owners will ultimately qualify for the reduced rates. The consultants estimate that nearly 42,000 parcels — about 45 percent of all assessed properties in the county — may be eligible for the 25 percent stormwater-treatment credit alone, largely homes inside HOAs and planned communities with private drainage systems.

How many of those owners will actually claim the credit, and how that would affect the county’s ability to hit its $9.24 million revenue target, isn’t addressed in the public materials.

The billing itself will lean on impervious-surface data that is, in places, several years old. For any property built in 2020 or earlier, the county is using federal aerial imagery captured in 2020 and 2021.

In 2023, the county conducted its own aerial survey, which the rate study says won’t be incorporated into the stormwater billing system until at least 2027, after the fee has already been in effect for a year.

Property owners who believe their impervious-area figure is wrong have 30 days from the date of their notice to appeal, first to the Public Works Director and, if unresolved, up the chain to the County Manager and ultimately to the Board.

Clay News & Views has submitted a detailed list of questions to the County, and we will publish a follow-up article once we receive their response.

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Kelly Brock-Sanchez was fired last year by the Clay County School District for a Facebook post wherein she mocked the assassination of Charlie Kirk and wished Trump would die too. Today, a hearing will decide if she gets to keep her teaching license.

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Brock-Sanchez is battling the Florida Department of Education and the School District and has asked people to donate to her via a GoFundMe campaign set up by a relative; she asks the public to donate to help her “heal from trauma and injustice.”

The GoFundMe also details Brock-Sanchez’s fight with cancer and a diagnosis of PTSD, stating the funds collected will be used to meet her $8,000 insurance deductible. The campaign has collected $1,551 so far.

Her illness combined with death threats and blowback from her post have allegedly left Brock-Sanchez destitute and in need of counseling for her PTSD.

But despite the lowly state described in her calls for donations, social media posts from the former teacher appear to tell a different tale. Brock-Sanchez and her husband have joined Facebook groups dedicated to ‘Disney Adults.’

In addition to Facebook, Brock-Sanchez has a TikTok account dedicated to her frequent trips to Disney parks. Based on the dates in the videos, it appears she is making the trek to Orlando at least twice a month, sometimes every weekend.

While enjoying the happiest place on earth is a valid hobby, it is certainly not cheap. Given Sanchez’s public campaign for financial assistance, the frequent Disney adventures have raised questions among community members.

Sanchez's administrative hearing to determine if she can retain her teaching license is scheduled for Friday. Documents from the case show that Sanchez blames the Clay Young Republicans, at least partially, for the loss of her teaching job.

The list of potential witnesses for the trial includes several leaders of the Young Republicans, as well as a slew of people from the Clay County School District.

The court filing also states:

“On her private Facebook page, Respondent stated the views that are the subject of this action. The post was only to be viewed by the individuals who were friends of

Respondent on her private account. An unknown individual apparently took a screenshot of Respondent’s post and forwarded it to various internet forums.

The post was then shared by the Clay County Young Republicans with a MAGA Influencer known as Scott Pressler. On his social media accounts, Mr. Pressler urged his followers to contact the Clay County School Board and the school to demand action be taken against Respondent.”

The filing goes on to state that stating an “opinion on a matter of public concern” to a private Facebook account is not “immoral,” nor does it reduce her effectiveness as a school board employee.

Clay News & Views was not able to find any instances of the Clay Young Republicans calling for Sanchez to lose her teaching job.

The tension between a person’s right to speak their mind and an employer’s right to fire someone for divisive speech is at the heart of the case, complicated by the fact that the employer is the government.

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Kelly Brock-Sanchez was not the only person who faced consequences for expressing their opinions about Charlie Kirk, and several people across the country challenged their employers after being fired.

Across the country, people fired for comments about Kirk have had mixed results in keeping or regaining their jobs.

In Florida, one prominent case involved a fish and wildlife employee named Brittney Brown. Brown shared a meme about Kirk’s death. Her post was discovered by the infamous “LibsOfTikTok” account and spread widely across the internet, leading to Brown's firing.

After being fired, Brown sued the state of Florida and settled the case for $485,000. The amount included back pay, damages, and attorney fees. Brown also agreed not to seek future employment with the agency.